This game is neat, I like the presentation and I'm a fan of some of the designs, but it's bare. I feel characters weren't given enough time to cook. Like Chris is suppose to be your rival but it feels like they put in the bare minimum of a rival arc.

Combat bounces between tedious and complete jokes, and missions like defend the flag just straight up suck, I skipped the VR ones after a point.

I feel that I would have liked this more if I didn't play it on a 3DS.

Ultimately it's neat but kind of generic with barely serviceable combat.

It's very easy to see how influential DQ3 was for RPGs and Japanese pop culture, which it entirely deserves. 

All the designs for the classes are immediately iconic, and the monsters are all memorable and expressive. This game is really good at signposting where you need to go next, until you get the boat, then it gets a little more shaky but still doable without using a guide. Combat is fairly simple but enjoyable, but you never really encounter something to challenge you due to there not being that many boss battles, with almost all of them backloaded.

I enjoyed the majority of this game, but I do feel that once you get to Alefgard, the game starts to drag, even if it is cool conceptually. Ultimately, you are stuck doing another fetch quest, which I did not find as enjoyable as looking for the orbs. At this point, I also started to find combat more tedious, with enemy encounters becoming more frequent and taking longer to deal with, especially in the final dungeon. It would have been nice to have MP restores outside of the limited rings and more types of healing herbs that do more than 30 HP.

Even with all that, it is still 100% worth playing. 

This is the best one in the Ryza series.

There is a lot of content in this game; I don’t have the data, but I still feel I can confidently say this is the longest one.

The game is very pretty, lots of nice biomes to explore. I’m surprised by just how big this game actually is; it is broken up into multiple large regions, containing areas with forests, canyons, caves, swamps, etc. Even the old region from Atelier Ryza 1 gets expanded on. Honestly, it felt a bit overwhelming at first. I do wish navigation was more convenient when going between the regions, however. I think my favourite visually was the Cleria region, but they are all good in my opinion.

I won’t go over the main story because of spoilers, but I will say I left Atelier Ryza 3 feeling satisfied with how it all played out. My only non-spoiler criticism of the main story is that there are quite a few points where you go to point A, watch a cutscene, go to point B, watch a cutscene, and then go back to point A to watch another cutscene.

The Random Quest mechanic is a clever way of having a bunch of generic "craft this", "collect this," and "hunt this" quests without them having the feeling of obligation that comes from a normal side quest. Random Quests give you something that can be solved almost immediately and where you get to decide if it is worth it without it being a constant marker on a map or having a "quest failed" mark in your list. There are still normal quests, but they do have a bit more to them and are not overly abundant.

World Quests are another new thing in Atelier Ryza 3. They are pretty much long, multipart side quests associated with a region in the game. I was surprised that they were all fully voiced. All of them I felt were worth doing and help add more to the world. But I do think they also have the same problem that the main story sometimes has with the running between Point A and Point B, ESPECIALLY one of the last ones you get.

I’m so happy that Bos finally got to be a party member because it was honestly weird that he wasn’t one in Atelier Ryza 2. All the new characters are great, especially Kala Ideas. She is incredibly fun and became my new favourite almost immediately. Something about Kala’s voice really brings everything together. I was surprised to learn her voice actor, Hina Yōmiya, is relatively new; her first role being in 2021. Alongside Kala, Federica and Dian fit in perfectly despite this being their first appearances.

All the returning characters are also great and it feels good to see these characters reach their arcs’ ends. But having reached the end of this three-game arc, I can now confidently say that Lent is the weakest character in your party. I’m sorry Lent, but you’re only interesting when your dad is in the scene with you. I do wish the Atelier Ryza 2 characters, Serri and Clifford had more presence in the story outside of just being mentioned. Not saying they should have been party members again because the party is big enough as it is, but something more would have been nice, like them having a World Quest or something.

Key crafting is a new gameplay mechanic that helps you in synthesising, field gathering, and combat. To be honest, I never used it to help in field gathering, so I don’t know how helpful they can be in that area, but I will say that they were really helpful for synthesising. There is never a reason not to use a key when synthesising; it’s always a smart decision, and I’m happy they added this feature.

Combat is pretty much the same as previous games, so I don’t really have anything to say. Using keys to buff you in combat can be a helpful addition against some heavy hitting bosses. I will quickly say that balance in this game can feel weird at some points, like enemies feeling weaker than they should be or stronger than they should be, and I could never figure out why it was like that at points. I think the Fatal Drives for most characters are not as cool as the ones in Atelier Ryza 2. They are definitely more flashy with effects and all that, but they don’t feel as dynamic or impactful. If you don’t really know what I mean, look at Patricia’s Fatal Drive in 3 and then compare it to hers in 2.

Some final minor random nitpicks I have are that the overworld dialogue can get repetitive really fast, and some of it can be pretty long. It probably would have helped if they either wrote more or had them occur less. Also, please make the container in the atelier bigger, Gust. I’m begging here; my brain desires hoarding.

The music was good. The Ryza games’ music is very cosy and great at creating the intended vibe, so no complaints there. The battle themes have a good balance between being upbeat and also getting you pumped for a fight. You can see what I mean in the battle themes, Summer Dawn and I'll Take You Down.

All in all, I’m very happy with Atelier Ryza 3 and the Ryza series as a whole. I’m very curious to see what the next Atelier will be.

Cool game. 

My only really big issue is that combat can be kind of dull; I end up feeling like I'm not really doing anything in most combat encounters. The only time I didn't feel this was with the final boss, and that was because it was significantly harder than anything else in the game.

I wish the Spookies had more time to develop; Six probably got the most, and Yu-ichi got barely anything. This game is pretty short for a RPG, so I wouldn't have minded if the game got stretched out a bit more for some more character interactions.

But as I said, it's still cool; I love the setting. The modern setting can be really underused in RPGs, and this game does a great job with it.

The character designs in this game are all great, unique, and fun. Even one-off characters that barely have any screentime have better designs than party members in some RPGs I've played.

I now believe in Nemissa supremacy. She was the absolute highlight of the game, a good design, a good personality, and a good character arc. 

What an amazing story. I won’t go too deeply into it because of spoilers, but I love how personal and focused the story is. It balances drama, comedy, and action really well. It left me wanting more, which is good. All the side story stuff is good too—a lot of comedy, insight, and character moments.

The three main characters, Soujyuro, Aoko, and Alice, are all fantastic and form a strong trio. A lot of the humour and drama comes from their interactions. Soujyuro might be one of the funniest Type-Moon protagonists and maybe even one of the funniest VN protagonists of all time. A lot of the VN’s humour comes from him, and it’s usually just him being himself. Aoko is all around really cool and very, very, attractive. She probably has the best expressions in this. Alice is a very fun and entertaining version of the cold, emotionless type. All of the extended cast is good too, but I do wish some had more screen time.

This is 100% the most high-budget visual novel I’ve read. Koyama's character designs are all striking and detailed, with tons of expressions. It’s also nice how many different outfits everyone has; I feel like you're lucky if a VN gives you two. All the background art is fantastic with amazing detail, all of it does a great job at creating a mood, especially all the stuff at night. Of course, there are tons of high-quality CGs. They do a lot of cool dynamic stuff in the more high tension situations—lots of motion, effects, and just a lot of stuff I would sum up as dynamic. Even outside of these moments, there is a lot of thought put into how characters are positioned in a scene.

I do want to talk about the translation in this game for a bit. This game has way too many grammar mistakes in it; it really needs a patch. There is double spacing, no spacing, words are missing, words are repeated, and there are even spelling mistakes. It does suck but it didn’t ruin it for me. I assume that VN’s translation was rushed to be ready at the same time as the Japanese release, so there wasn’t enough time for proper proofreading.

Another odd thing is how they chose to translate the names. In practically every single Japanese thing I’ve engaged with in my life, "し" is translated to "shi," but here they translate it to "si," so you get names like "Sizuki" and "Yamasiro" instead of "Shizuki" and "Yamashiro." Imagine if one day Fate/Stay Night gets an official translation and Shirou becomes Sirou; that would feel wrong, right? I don’t even know how Fumizuka becomes Fumidsuka. To make all of this even odder, in the digital artbook that comes with the special edition, both the Nasu and Koyama comments wrote Yamasiro’s name as Yamashiro. There is even a short story in it where a character’s name is written as Yoshitsune.

The name thing is odd but not the end of the world, but the game really needs a patch to fix all the mistakes, and I wouldn't be surprised if it showed up between now and the English physical release, which would make this entire section completely useless to people reading this in the future.

Overall, Witch on the Holy Night is a really strong start as the first official Type-Moon visual novel in English, and I hope this leads to more like the Tsukihime remake coming over too.

Please play this.